With Republicans expected to change the Senate rules to slash debate time on President Donald Trump’s nominees this week, it will mark the third time the “nuclear option” — changing Senate rules by a simple majority — has been triggered in just six years.

Advertisement

Each of those unilateral moves by a Senate majority to weaken the Senate’s age-old precedents centered on nominations, leaving the legislative filibuster and its 60-vote threshold unscathed. But some senators say it’s just a matter of time before even that Senate institution is more or less wiped away by a majority tired of seeing its big ideas blocked.

Though the Senate is up for grabs in 2020, neither party is expected to come away with a supermajority due to the limited number of competitive races. And that likely puts the supermajority requirement itself in jeopardy — particularly if one party controls the White House, House and Senate and wants to move its agenda.

And in true Senate fashion, Republicans and Democrats are already bickering over who is more likely to blow up the Senate as soon as 2021.

“It’ll go down the road,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said of the filibuster. “If the Democrats take control of the Senate and we’re in a strong minority then they’ll change it immediately.”

POLITICO Playbook newsletter

Sign up today to receive the #1-rated newsletter in politics

Email

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

“If eliminating the legislative filibuster will serve Sen. McConnell’s purposes, he’ll eliminate it,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “After what Sen. McConnell has done to this institution, there will be many people who will be putting pressure on us to do the same thing.”

The latest change by Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) to cut debate time from 30 hours to two hours apiece for lower level executive nominees and District Court picks was, somewhat ironically, initially blocked by filibuster-wielding Democrats on Tuesday.

Just one Republican, Mike Lee of Utah, opposed moving to debate the rules change, making a broader argument that the Senate's rules are intended to balance "competing interests of majorities, minorities, and individual senators."

"They facilitate the compromise and accountability that are essential to the governing of a large, diverse nation," Lee said. "I oppose changing the post-cloture time rule. I certainly oppose breaking the rules of the Senate to do so. The current rules can work for the American people; they simply require us to do the same."

But McConnell will move to use the nuclear option later this week to make the change anyway by a simple majority, overruling Democratic objections and speeding up Trump’s nominations — a top priority of the president, who has long railed against Democratic delays. Last week, Trump handed McConnell a list of nominees at a party meeting and urged the GOP leader to get them confirmed.

The move by the Republican leader potentially sets the table for future, more radical changes, just as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) foray into scrapping the supermajority requirement on certain nominees laid the groundwork for this week’s move by the GOP.

“We’re going to be the House of Representatives by the time my term is done. And that will be McConnell’s legacy,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who was just reelected to a six-year term. “We’re headed to a majoritarian institution. And maybe we’re better off. Maybe we’d be able to have actual debates and real amendments. The House has more debate than we do.”

If Democrats win the Senate and the White House next year, there will be enormous pressure for them to gut the filibuster to enact an ambitious progressive agenda — D.C. statehood or climate change legislation or some other proposal that will not find support among enough Republicans to pass the chamber under existing rules.

Meanwhile, Trump has made clear he wants to kill the supermajority requirement, a demand that may gain new momentum if he wins reelection and Republicans take back full control of Congress. Republicans held off Trump from changing the rules for two years of unified power, but he called for McConnell to go nuclear even after the election cost the GOP the House.

“I won’t be one calling for its elimination,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “That’s what President Trump wanted to do. And we kept telling him, ‘You don’t want that to happen.’ We don’t want that to happen.”

After the Senate GOP killed the 60-vote requirement on Supreme Court nominees in 2017, dozens of rank-and-file senators wrote to McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowing to protect the filibuster. Many senators view the filibuster as a trusty old friend that’s fended off the other parties’ most extreme ideas over the years, and they are vowing to protect it.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is still deciding whether to support the effort to cut debate time, acknowledging there is a “genuine” problem that one senator can delay any nominee for days. She was more emphatic about protecting the historic legislative guardrail.

“I would never support doing away with the legislative filibuster,” she said in an interview, handing a reporter a copy of the letter she and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) spearheaded in 2017.

“That’s the one thing that people will not do,” insisted Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.). “I really think that will not happen.”

Yet Democratic activists have helped turn the filibuster into a new litmus in the Democratic presidential primary. They argue that there’s almost no way to enact sweeping changes like “Medicare for All” or a “Green New Deal” if 41 GOP senators can stop everything.

Several Democratic senators running for president, like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, are open to gutting the legislative filibuster. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey have been cooler to the idea. But change can happen quickly.

A decade ago, few would have foreseen the end of the 60-vote threshold on presidential nominations. That was before Republicans began stalling President Barack Obama’s nominees and ultimately blocking several of them in 2013, which precipitated the first stroke of the filibuster’s demise.

For four years, Supreme Court nominees were the only appointments subject to supermajority requirement until McConnell got rid of that, too, in 2017 in the face of a Democratic blockade of Justice Neil Gorsuch. That move came after the GOP denied Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a vote or even a hearing.

Now, McConnell is set to make Senate confirmation swifter for Trump and future presidents amid frustration over Democratic delays of nominees. And he’s setting the stage for more changes the next time the Senate majority becomes fed up with the minority.

“At the end of the day, these changes deepen the divisions and the slope continues to ending the filibuster,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “The ‘nuclear option’ used to be nuclear. No longer.”